Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams was identified as a “subversive” by Britain’s internal security service during the 1980s, The Telegraph recently revealed. The report follows Williams’ recent public denunciation of the British government’s trimming of its gargantuan welfare state, over which he exuded “bafflement and indignation.”
The Church of England’s senior prelate, who also heads the global Anglican Communion, is more professor and aesthete than pastor. His long-time affinity for dreamy politics of the Left, divorced both from earthly reality and Heavenly good sense, have further undermined his communion even as it struggles over a schism regarding sex and theology.
During the 1980s, Williams busily demonstrated outside U.S. and British military bases, earning arrest in 1985 for his civil disobedience with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He was part of the international Soviet-backed campaign to prevent the Reagan administration’s placement of Pershing II missiles in Western Europe, in response to the Soviets’ earlier placement of threatening SS-20s. The Soviets hoped to compound their conventional force superiority in Europe with nuclear superiority.
No thanks to myopic activists like Williams, joined by millions of demonstrators, the anti-U.S. campaign throughout Europe famously failed to intimidate President Ronald Reagan or Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The U.S. missiles were deployed, persuading the Soviets to negotiate the removal of all intermediate range nukes in Europe. Reagan better intuited the path to peace than did ostensibly sophisticated clerics like Williams and his cohorts at Cambridge and Oxford.
Reportedly, Britain’s MI-5 had a dossier on Williams’ peacenik activism that was shared with then Prime Minister Thatcher and other senior British officials in the late 1980s. In the 1970s the young theologian had helped found a leftist “Jubilee Group” that inveighed against capitalism and apparently included neo-Marxist wannabes. Later, Thatcher reputedly cited the Jubilee Group as “the most subversive group within the religious community in England,” while one British newspaper derisively dismissed it as “a bunch of neo-Marxist trendy clerics.”
Williams reportedly co-wrote the Jubilee Group’s 1974 manifesto, which denounced “the ruthless pursuit of private gain” and the “idolatry of profit” adding: “We cannot…feign neutrality, or remain uncritical, in the face of a society based upon the ruthless pursuit of private gain and unlimited consumption.” According to The Telegraph, the manifesto concluded: “We do not run away from history. We know what the present crisis of capitalism demands of us…we are in the death-throes of late capitalism, which threatens to inflict even greater violence on mankind than it has done before, we must make our stand with the oppressed, with the movement for liberation throughout the world.”
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